It’s Not Too Late to Stop Climate Change, and It’ll Be Super-Cheap - by Joe Romm

I rarely disagree with Dave Roberts.  But he has a column on Grist, We can solve climate change, but it won’t be cheap or easy, that is wrong, pure and simple.

I’ll explain why it will be very cheap in two posts — one focusing on the literature and one focused more on my 15 years of experience working directly with businesses to develop, deploy, and analyze the cost-effectiveness of technologies/strategies to cut carbon pollution, including several years helping to oversee the primary federal office charged with that very mission.

The cost of action is perhaps the second most important issue in the entire climate arena. If a climate hawk like Roberts can get it wrong (along with The New York Times climate blog), there is clearly a serious misunderstanding going on.

The most important climate issue is the cost and consequences of inaction.  The climate science has now reached the point that one can definitively say failure to very aggressively try to “solve” climate change is not either a rational or moral option for a nation or humanity as a whole.  As Dave Roberts himself has explained, “The results of inaction are morally unacceptable.  They are also economically unacceptable….”

To be crystal clear, my position — what the literature and field experience make crystal clear — is that solving climate (stabilizing at 2°C) is cheap, by any plausible definition of the word.  Indeed, it is “super-cheap.”

The always overly-conservative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reviewed the entire literature on the subject and concluded the annual growth loss to preserve a livable climate is 0.06% — and that’s “relative to annualized consumption growth in the baseline that is between 1.6% and 3% per year.”  So we’re talking annual growth of, say 2.24 percent rather than 2.30 percent to save billions and billions of people from needless suffering for decades if not centuries.
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The 2014 IEA report, Energy Technology Perspectives, explained that an aggressive effort to deploy renewable energy and energy efficiency (and energy storage) to keep global warming below the dangerous threshold of 2°C — their 2DS scenario — would require investment in clean energy of only about 1% of global GDP per year.  But it would still be astoundingly cost-effective:

The $44 trillion additional investment needed to decarbonise the energy system in line with the 2DS by 2050 is more than offset by over $115 trillion in fuel savings – resulting in net savings of $71 trillion.

So yes, solving climate change is “cheap.”  It is NOT “easy,” however, and I have striven to avoid using that word.  When I talk about this I usually say it is “not easy, but straightforward.”  And by that I mean “we know precisely what needs to be done and the net cost is quite low,” which is not the case for many other problems facing humanity.

Read more at It’s Not Too Late to Stop Climate Change, and It’ll Be Super-Cheap